Getting Things Organized

 Hello everyone!

This week I just wanted to get everything organized, getting a google slides set up for me to add the information that I've found, find a way to link my Instagram so that you can keep up with my plants, and embed some of the videos I watch this week relating to my topic. 

The Google Slides 

Here is the link to the google slides. In those slides, I will slowly put together a set of slides that will contain all of my work and project progress. I will update it as I go so it can act as a way to view most of my blog content all in one place. 

Instagram 

Here is a link to my Instagram. This is where I post all of my plant work when I think of it. I will be using this as I go more and more. You can follow if you'd like, it's not weird. :)  

Video 

There were a couple of videos that I wanted to link that I thought were quite interesting. Two from Nigel Saunders, who is described to be the Bob Ross of Bonsai. He's from waterloo Ontario and has a pretty good-sized channel. He's great to watch while working or just taking it easy. The two videos of his I have linked are about his Larch forest. Larch trees look like coniferous trees but they lose their needles each year. They go a nice orange color in the fall so that's something to look out for.   

In part one of this series, Nigel works on the apex of his main tree, which is the upper branches that form the cap to the design. In the beginning, he was hinting that he might take the whole top off and start over which I completely disagree with. In the end, he took a more moderate approach, just cleaning up some of the stray branches. He also cleaned up all the needles on the ground of the planting which just makes it look nicer and then cleaned the moss climbing up the bases of the tree. As he says in the video, this can cause discoloration and rotting of the base of the tree so it's good to clean up regularly.    

In part two he spent most of the video working on the lichen all over his trees. Lichen lives on the surface of the tree back and feeds off of the dead tissue. It behaves very similarly to moss and in this case, he wants to get rid of all of the lichen because it stops the buds on the body of the tree from getting light and therefore not be able to swell and sprout. Back budding, as it's called, is important for bonsai because it allows you to increase the size ratio of the trunk to the branches. 

That is all for this week, I will be looking forward to the next parts of Nigel's larch forest work. Hope you guys check him out.